Blogging for Doing English Digital: Student evaluations

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Computers and Composition 27 (2010) 266–283

Blogging for Doing English Digital: Student evaluations Zhang Wei Department of English, Peking University, Beijing, China Received 8 December 2008; received in revised form 7 January 2010; accepted 15 September 2010

Abstract The emergence of social software tools in recent years, such as blogs and Wikis, has provided new opportunities in supporting an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) digital literacy pedagogy. This study explored the student evaluation of blogging for Doing English Digital, a project-based course at Peking University that aims to develop students’ English digital literacy skills. Findings from the focus group interview suggest that from the student perspective, blogging has the potential to help construct individual identities with a variety of semiotic resources and to provide the social, affective, and metacognitive support essential to the development of digital literacy skills. However, the value of blogging for knowledge co-construction is limited. To maximize the value of blogging for the development of EFL digital literacy skills in the Web 2.0 era, EFL instructors need to integrate blogs with other social networking technologies and design meaningful activities that not only encourage peer interaction within the class community, but also support learners in developing social networking skills to connect to a valuable public beyond the class. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction As we move deeper into a digital age, one broad consensus in the field of language education is that the traditional English curriculum needs to be expanded to include the teaching of digital literacy skills. In the William P. Fenn Lectures presented in key Chinese universities a decade ago, Clifford Hill (1998, 2000) called for a new College English curriculum built around digital literacy, a set of skills that involves the use of critical and creative thinking skills in communicating and constructing digital information using word, sound, and image (Gilster, 1997; Kress, 1999; Shetzer & Warschauer, 2000). Hill proposed the use of project-based instruction, a sound pedagogical model of social constructivist approach of teaching initiated in the early twentieth centuries by John Dewey and William Kilpatrick (Benson, 2001), to help Chinese college students develop English as a Foreign Language (EFL) digital literacy skills essential to their academic success in a digital age. Over the ensuing decade, Chinese universities have actively heeded this call, which has led to a series of innovative practices and research that bring together project-based instruction and EFL digital literacy development (e.g. Gu, 2006; Zhang, 2003, 2006). To enhance the effectiveness of a project-based EFL digital literacy pedagogy, it is crucial to develop a social constructivist online learning environment that permits maximum individual control over the learning process while supporting collaborative and reflective activities in effective ways. Standardized learning management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard and WebCT are developed for content delivery and management, thus they cannot effectively support a social constructivist pedagogy that emphasizes self-governed and collaborative activities (Anderson, 2005; Dalsgaard,

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2006). As noted in Stephen Downes (2006), a learning environment built upon a closed, centralized, standardized LMS causes both teachers and learners tend to slip into the traditional mode of learning that focuses on knowledge transmission rather than knowledge construction. Moreover, an intensified use of standardized LMS—which is often financially expensive—may constrain the opportunities teachers have for pedagogical innovations and the opportunities learners have for active participation in the global network society (Lankshear, 2006). In recent years, the emergence of educational applications of social software, that is, “networking tools that support and encourage individuals to learn together while retaining individual control over their time, space, presence, activity, identity and relationship” (Anderson, 2005, p.4), provides new possibilities in addressing these constraints. Leading researchers in the field of technology and education believe that educational applications of blogs, Wikis, RSS, and other reading-and-writing-related Internet technologies can bring together learning, reflection, and conversation (Downes, 2007; Sessums, 2006; Siemens, 2004), enable learners to connect and collaborate in ways that are “deeply participatory” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006), expand learners’ freedom of engagement in a valuable learning relationship with other learners (Anderson, 2005), and extend the learning community beyond the traditional class-based community (Farmer, 2006). Blogs, which are web-authoring tools that enable users to instantly publish text, sound, and image as a webpage with a unique URL, are among the most popular social software tools. In addition to posting their own content, users can also make hyperlinks, receive comments from a public audience, and form loosely connected communities. A number of English teachers in the U.S. have experimented with a variety of blogging activities such as reading responses (e.g. Lowe & Williams, 2004; West, 2008), group discussions (e.g. Bloch, 2007), and e-portfolios (see Helen Barret’s blog ).1 It is widely believed that blogging can support a social process of writing, develop critical thinking, enhance interaction, facilitate collaborative knowledge construction (Bernstein, 2004; Carlson, 2003; Godwin-Jones, 2003; Johnson, 2004; Oravec, 2003; Wang, Fix, & Bock, 2004), and extend the learning community to a valuable public outside the classroom (Farmer, 2006; Ferdig & Trammell, 2004; Lowe & Williams, 2004). In China, however, despite a growing enthusiasm for educational blogging in recent years (e.g., Li, 2005; Lü, 2006; Hu, 2006; Shen & Zhang, 2006; Yu, 2007; Wu, 2008; Zhuang, 2005), findings from the limited empirical studies have suggested little evidence for the effectiveness of blogging in fostering critical thinking and collaborative knowledge construction. After analyzing the blog-based peer review of two writing assignments among 39 low-intermediate adult EFL learners in Taiwan, Wen-shuenn Wu (2006) found a lack of constructive peer feedback and substantive revisions. In a related study outside the field of EFL education, KanKan Chan and Jim Ridgway (2006) explored the effectiveness of blogging in a Computer Applications course at the University of Macau. The results of the survey of 47 young students from a teacher education program, as well as the findings from the content analysis of student blogs, offer little evidence for blogs facilitating deep reflection nor extended peer interactions conducive to collaborative knowledge construction. To determine the usefulness of blogging for a constructivist EFL pedagogy in the Chinese context, more empirical evidence is needed. According to the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989), it is also important to understand how learners who are the main users of the technology evaluate the usefulness of blogging in supporting the completion of tasks at hand. This study investigates how learners from a Chinese university evaluated the effectiveness of blogging in supporting learning in the project-based course Doing English Digital, an EFL course that aims to help students develop English digital literacy skills. 2. Pedagogical context This study was conducted at Peking University (PKU) while sixteen undergraduate students in varied years of study and disciplines took the course Doing English Digital during the Spring Semester of 2006. As the “Harvard in China,” to quote from a speech delivered by former United States President Bill Clinton at the university in 1998, PKU is one of the first choices for academically talented students from all over China. Upon entering PKU, the students are required to take courses from the College English program, a two-year compulsory English program in China for all undergraduates who do not major in English. Despite a recent emphasis on the use of technology in College English 1

Godwin-Jones (2003) suggests various methods of integrating blogging into language teaching.

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Fig. 1.

instruction, the technology mainly served as a tool for content delivery rather than knowledge construction, and the goals of the required College English courses are largely confined to the mastery of language skills associated with print literacy. Aiming at developing student digital literacy skills in English, the course Doing English Digital was first developed for advanced learners of the College English program in the year 2000. The course, now listed under the Core Undergraduate Curriculum of PKU, is built upon a project-based social constructivist pedagogy that values Dewey’s educational principle of “learning by doing.” The students are required to carry out a semester-long digital research projects in their major area of study and present a 10-page research paper as well as a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation at the end of the semester. To complete the project, the students need to use digital literacy skills, including the use of search skills to locate relevant information from the Internet and digital databases, critical thinking skills to evaluate the credibility of collected information, organizational skills to integrate various bodies of information into a coherent framework, and presentation skills to communicate the research results in both oral and written English. To support learning for Doing English Digital, an online learning environment was developed based on the Open Learning Environment model (OLE model), a constructivist design model featured by its context-responsiveness in learner control and instructor support (Hannafin, Land, & Oliver, 1999). Nine online modules were created to provide the conceptual, procedural, strategic, and metacognitive scaffolding that supports the completion of the digital research project and a blog community was set up for the students to create, share, and reflect upon their work-in-progress.2 The instructor also maintains a course blog at for lecture notes, tasks, online research writing resources, and links to the student blogs (Figure 1). The course’s blog community was initially set up at MSN Spaces, a popular blog hosting service among Chinese students. MSN Spaces offers a wide choice of artistic templates and user-friendly design features that allows students to easily personalize the interface of their blogs. However, an unexpected five-day shutdown of the MSN blog services in China five weeks before the end of the course precipitated the movement of the whole community to Boyake [“ ”] at , a newly developed PKU-hosting service for the course blogs that provides responsive technical support but a limited choice of design templates. The students were required to use their personal blogs to complete and reflect upon a series of tasks anchored to their self-selected digital research projects. One of the tasks, for example, is to evaluate the collected digital sources.

2

These modules can be viewed at .

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Fig. 2.

The students were required to describe the search strategies used in locating the digital information, the credibility of the sources, a summary of each reference, and a plan for using these references in their project presentations. The task was designed to help the students develop critical thinking skills in evaluating digital information, and to encourage the students to find their own voice not only as EFL learners, but also as a member of the discourse community interacting with sources authored by international scholars in their fields of study (see Figure 2 for a student source evaluation entry). In addition to these tasks, the students also reflected upon the process of completing their research projects on their course blogs. The course requirement for student reflection is quite flexible: the student can decide on the language and length for each entry as well as the frequency of updating. Most students shifted between English and Chinese in their reflections. The students are encouraged, though not required, to comment on each other’s blogs. Figure 3 is an

Fig. 3.

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example of a student reflection entry about his new insights in writing introduction, often considered the most difficult part of composing a research paper.3 I had thought that the easiest part to write in a research paper is the introduction. But it dawned on me that introduction is in fact most difficult to write. Introduction is like a story, which should always be a bit larger than the focus of the paper. But how to expand a little bit and how to narrow down later is indeed troublesome. . . Depressed by the introduction writing experience last Tuesday, I decide to put it aside for a while and start from the review section. After organizing the relevant literature, it is not that difficult to write it up. And, suddenly, I had a clearer idea about the introduction. Never had I expected to gain this experience!!!! These blogging activities are consistent with the social constructivist principles of encouraging ownership and voice in the learning process (Honebein, 1996), maximizing learner control of the learning process (Benson, 2001), emphasizing active construction of knowledge based on the knowledges and experiences of learners, and encouraging sharing and supporting the development of higher-order thinking skills (Dewey, 1991). 3. Methods The purpose of the study was to investigate how learners evaluate the value of blogging in supporting the completion of their research projects for Doing English Digital. A focus-group interview, a type of planned in-depth group discussion that is increasingly popular for investigating attitudes, perceptions, and opinions in program evaluation (Krueger & Casey, 2000), was conducted after the students took the course Doing English Digital in the Spring Semester of 2006. Krueger and Casey (2000) suggest that for large studies on sensitive topics among strangers, using multiple focus groups conducted by an external moderator increases data reliability. Given the exploratory nature of the study and the small size of the class being studied, I conducted one focus group that lasted 55 minutes. A graduate student from the English department took notes. To control my influences on the interview results as both the instructor and the moderator, the interview was conducted after the students had received their grades. The fact that the course is an elective course instead of a required one, and that none of the participants were English majors (my home department), further minimized my possible influences on the student response. In addition, the Chinese language was used so as to make the participants less inhibited in expressing their feelings and opinions. Six students participated in the focus group interview.4 To ensure some variety in student evaluation, the selection of participants reflects differences in academic major, gender, class performance, and blogging activity (Table 1). According to Krueger and Casey (2000), the group size was ideal for a focus group: small enough to allow each participant to talk yet large enough to provide diverse perspectives. None of the students had ever used a blog for educational purposes, though some of them used MSN Spaces for private diaries. One of the focus group’s major limitations was that it only included students who had performed well in the course. The course tends to attract the upper range of students at PKU, and all of the course’s students had performed quite successfully. To a certain extent, this limitation might be advantageous because the similarities among the participants, as noted in Krueger and Casey (2000), might allow them to feel more comfortable in disclosing their perspectives. After all, the goal of the focus group interview is not to make generalizations but to provide richer information for the instructor to improve teaching and for interested readers to connect and reflect on their own teaching. The questions for the focus group interview were organized around participant reflections about their blogging, including both rewarding and frustrating experiences (see Appendix for the interview questions). I transcribed the 3

These reflection entries are saved in the archive of Kang’s blog (see ). Still an active blogger, Kang is now in the doctoral program at a Canadian University. 4 Eight students were invited for the focus group interview, but two students had time conflicts with meetings or exams and did not participate in the interview.

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Table 1 Focus group participants. Name

Gender

Major

Active Level

Performance Level

Lei Ruo Lan Kang Wen Sen

Male Female Female Male Female Male

Economics Archaeology International Relations Chemistry Economics Environment

High High Medium Medium High Medium

High High Medium High Medium High

Note. Different active and performance levels are ascribed to each participant based on the quantity/quality of their blog entries and their final grades respectively.

recording of the focus group interview for analysis. In keeping with the qualitative method of data analysis (Bogdan & Biklin, 1998; Chen, 2000), I read the transcript several times during the initial coding, using the informant’s vocabulary whenever applicable. I then used the technique of focused coding to eliminate, combine, and subdivide the codes. This process generated 15 final codes. Finally, I organized the connected codes into six categories: four categories under “rewarding blogging experiences” and two categories under “frustrating blogging experiences” respectively (Figure 4). To triangulate with the self-report data collected from the focus group interview, relevant student blog entries were used as supplemental materials when analyzing the focus group findings. 4. Major findings Students seem to be consciously representing themselves through blogging using various semiotic resources, leading to an increased awareness of self-identity. For student participant Ruo, a blog entry is “imprinted with personal labels” that signal the blogger’s unique identity:

Fig. 4.

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Fig. 5.

(A1) You’ve got to have your own personal style, a clear individual consciousness: This is my work, imprinted with personal labels, not something that can be handled casually. [I] have these feelings. So you should do it well. I mean, it’s quite stressful, but there is also a sense of freedom. (A1) Representing oneself in the private and yet public space of blogging may go beyond the use of linguistic resources. The female participants pointed out that they regard their blogs as their homes, and, as Ruo notes, they would “ ” [“manage”] their blogs as if they were “ ” [“dressing themselves up”]. For example, like many other students enrolled in the course, Ruo made an effort to select and post a group of scenic photos taken from her various trips that signal her “ ” [“taste”] and experiences.5 Her experimentation with images is not limited to “dressing herself up.” When selecting topics, Ruo, like other student bloggers in the class, created a map to visualize all her thoughts relevant to her initial topic, which was “conservation of irremovable relic sites.” This map helped Ruo identify the focus of her research paper, “Criteria and Principles of Relic Restoration” (the yellow branches of the concept map). In her final draft, she added a photo taken by one of her major department’s professors at the restoration site of the Nara Temple in Japan, a successful example of relic restoration. This photo illustrated how a thorough reconstruction of an ancient timber-structured building based on the principles of relic restoration she proposed in her paper has retained rather than destroyed the authenticity of historic buildings (Figures 5 and 6). For male participants, the awareness of the representation of themselves through blogging seems more associated with “ ”[“face”] or “ ”[“image”]. In Sen’s words, these are an important source of achieving identity in the Chinese society. For Sen, what is posted on his blog matters to his “ ” [“image”] in the real world: (A1) You are writing yourself, and you’ve got to put your heart into what you write. Then when others read your blog, they can see that what you’ve posted really resembles you, not just someone who is coasting along. It’s a matter of image. (A1) 5

After moving all the project blog entries to “ diary.

”, Ruo keeps her blog at MSN Spaces, her favorite blog hosting space, only for personal

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Fig. 6.

A conscious awareness of the connection between writing and identity is often translated into more responsibility ”[“lose face”], Sen, who had never reviewed his drafts in in writing. To ensure that his writings will not let him“ the past, has now developed a habit of rereading his writing before posting it to his blog. He says,

(A2; B6) Yeah, I cannot simply post some rough stuff there, because everybody is reading and we are all taking the same course. . . . I need to check if my writing is correct, if the grammar is correct. [I will] lose face [if I] post something rough. It’s like being watched over. Generally speaking, I never took a second look at my writings. But to post it online, I’ve got to check twice. Everybody can read it. It is not good if the writing is too shabby. (A2; B6) Indeed, “face” matters because the students care about how they are judged by their target audience of real-world friends and classmates. During the focus group, almost every participant mentioned that the links on their online “friends list” are not strangers who happened to step into their territory, but friends and classmates connected with them in the real world. However, friends from outside the class are not able to, in Ruo’s words, “ ”[“follow up”] on the research project blogs because these blogs require effort to understand and are less fun to read than personal diaries. Thus, friends outside the course have gradually faded from the research blog community and the audience was reduced to the students taking the same course. Nonetheless, the loss of these friends from the blog community, whose knowledge of the content of research topic is often limited and whose comments are largely confined to short encouraging remarks in Chinese, did not seem to affect the student authors’ use of their blogs. Another theme that emerged from the interview data is the enhanced motivation for writing produced by the blogging experience. Lan described how the possibility of personalizing the individual writing spaces creates a kind of “ ”[“impulse”] for her to write. She said, (B3) Because on blogs, you can individualize and decorate it into the style that you like. This gives you the impulse to write on it. (B3)

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Writing reflection entries on blogs were particularly liberating. Kang notes that writing reflections with the wordprocessing software Microsoft Word is “ ”[“too serious”]. Similarly, Ruo thinks it “ ”[“too restraining”] to write her reflections in a Word document. She says, (B3) Exactly, I feel that it is restraining to write when facing a Word document. And it feels more like writing when facing that blog. (B3) Ruo also notes that it is less serious to draft her research tasks directly on the blog, so she often uses Word to draft the research tasks first and then paste them onto her blog. This was noted by several informants as a secure and common blogging strategy since the students sometimes lost their work when clicking the “publish” tab on the blogging platform. The interview data suggest that the pressure of sharing one’s work-in-progress with an authentic audience is another motivating factor for blogging. For Kang, the possibility that “ ”[“everybody can see (your writing)”] is strong enough to motivate him to write (B4). For other participants, browsing each other’s blogs often generates pressure and creates a higher performance motivation. Weng says, (B4) [Compared with other effects of blogging], I still think it is quite useful to read others’ [posts]. It will give you pressure. If you just submit your own work, it will definitely not be as good. (B4) Specifically, Lan describes how the pressure is translated into higher motivation:

(B4) I would read the posts by others before submitting mine. . . . One time I read Lei’s outline, [which was] a huge pressure for me. Then I tried my best to catch up with him. (B4) The interview data futher suggest that blogging helps the students enhance self-monitoring in the process of completing the digital research project. For Ruo, blogging means “ ” [“documentation”] and “ ”[“constant modification”]. She says,

(C6) Blogging involves lots of documentation and constant modification. Modification is fairly important in the whole process. It’s not okay just to have one product. (C6) Such a change in the student writing process is partially associated with the features of the blog technology. The participants reported that the chronological display of blog entries often forces them to reread their earlier posts and discover problems to be fixed. Besides, the ease of changing, archiving, and creating web pages through blogging turns each blog entry into a temporary text that invites constant revisions. Sen notes that the special “ ”[“opportunity”] for revision with blogs did not exist in his past writing experiences:

(C6)

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In fact, one benefit of blogging is that you are forced to read what you posted earlier each time you log on. After rereading your work, you may discover, “Oh, my writing did not flow very well.” Then [you can] quickly fix the problems. [I’m] not sure whether other people have read the updated version. You can change it anyway and post the correct version. Many times, I noticed that the word choice is not appropriate and the grammar is incorrect. So I quickly fixed the problems in my earlier posts. You cannot do that, for sure, with usual homework—a piece of paper that can never be taken back. You don’t have the opportunity [to change it]. (C6) The flexibility of making revisions with blogs also allows the students to have more control over their writing process. Ruo says,

(C7) People differ in their state of mind and the momentum [of writing]. You will become impetuous with a fixed deadline assigned to you. In the past, students didn’t have any control in terms of homework submission. If the teacher says next week, then you will come over to submit [the homework]. But blogging [is different], you can post one piece up on Monday and revise on Tuesday if it is not good enough. You can control the pace of writing, decide when to do it, what to post, and, if there is anything wrong, revise anytime you want. It’s not like submitting whenever the teacher wants it. The thing is, when you submit [your homework] to the teacher, you may not want to make any changes. But the second day, you will [say] “Oh, there is something wrong.” It’s impossible for you to ask your teacher to give it back to you for revision once submitted. But you can log onto your blog and make changes there. (C7) Because she is able to revise constantly before and after the deadlines, Ruo has individualized her blog-writing processes and is liberated from the tyranny of the deadlines set for all the students by the instructor. As the students made recursive revisions, they developed useful revision strategies. For example, rather than “ ” [“weighing word by word”] at the stage of drafting, Sen finds it more effective to delay revision until the writing is finished. He says,

(C8) Weighing word by word is really time consuming. And ineffective as well. Basically, it is probably most effective to revise after you finish a passage. . . . For example, if I were asked to submit [the print version of] my homework on Saturday, I won’t be able to have much progress [in revision] if I just finished the writing today (Friday) because my ideas won’t change much. [With blogs], after leaving the post aside for one week and totally forgetting about it, [I] can make some real progress in revision. (C8) The interview data suggest that documenting, sharing, and reflecting upon the whole research writing process through blogging provides the students a richer base for reflection. This base leads to a deepened understanding of the conceptual and procedural knowledge of digital research writing as well as a deeper understanding of the research topic under investigation. Lei noted that the very process of documentation is itself a process of “ “refining and reflecting”]. Sen regards his posts for the course as “ [“precious”] materials worth saving after the course

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for “ ” [“reflection or recollection”]. He says, “ ”[“When (I) look back, at least (I will) know what these stages (for writing) are.”] Similarly, Ruo believes that documenting the research writing process helped her “ ”[sort out her own pace of writing], which could be a useful reference for her future research writing. She says,

(D10) I think research writing has its pace. This is my first time to sort out my own pace. So when you write again, you can compare the two paces and, of course, make some adjustments. If you have a complete sequence to follow each time you write a paper, you will have an automatic process; just like driving, you won’t act frantically. (D10) Specifically, Ruo describes how documenting the research process on the blog helped her understand the importance of making an outline, a key component of research writing frequently neglected by the students:

(D10) [Blogging] means reflection. There are many posts for each stage [of the project]. With [Microsoft] Word, even if you want to revise, say, the outline, you will only keep the final version, not the earlier ones. But all the versions of the outline will be [archived] on the blog. Then you can compare different versions of the outline and will learn how it takes its current shape after steps of revisions. [Then you will have] a clear understanding of the whole process. A very impressive experience for me was to learn how the outline can influence later work. This is revealing because you will understand the purpose of each step [in the process of writing.] (D10) Although some writers were in the habit of saving different versions of drafts using Microsoft Word, this process becomes automatic with blogs. Furthermore, the chronological display of blog entries makes the editing history more visible and transparent. These reflections become enriched as the students shared and compared their documentation of the research writing process with each other in the blog community. Ruo notes that making comparisons, especially with the sample student work recommended by the teacher, has deepened her understanding of the concept of critical thinking,6 one of the three criteria of the evaluation rubric for the digital research project. She says,

(D9) 6

The evaluation rubric for the research project consists of three criteria: content, clarity, and critical/creative thinking. The criteria of critical/creative thinking, which was developed to capture the core skills of digital literacy, was described as follows: Thoughtful treatment of the topic that goes beyond the most familiar ideas; fair-minded evaluation of varied perspectives that demonstrates an enlarged understanding of the topic under discussion; and active interaction with sources that builds on, extends, or adapts others’ ideas in meaningful ways.

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It is important to make comparisons. Of course comparisons will generate pressure, but still, it’s very good to make comparisons. Then you will know in which ways others’ work is better than yours and why it’s better to do it this way. Sometimes you don’t have any idea of what is good. Even though the teacher may tell you to do this and that, say, to use critical thinking skills or to be accurate, you don’t know what it means until you actually “see” it in other students’ posts. It’s good to know what it looks like. (D9) Apart from reflecting through comparing with each other’s work, constructive feedback from peers can sometimes provoke thoughtful reflections as well. When discussing the most enjoyable blogging experiences, Lei describes how the feedback from a classmate has furthered his thought on a neglected issue in his draft:

(D11) I remember that once, I posted my draft on the blog. Lin wrote some feedback, questioning some of my hypotheses that I had taken for granted when I was drafting. After reading her reply, I thought it necessary to make some further explanations. Her questions made me reconsider what I wrote. Other forms of homework could hardly have done better in that regard. (D11) Figure 7, the image of the blog entry that Lei commented on in the focus group, shows the conversation between Lei, a second-year economic major, and his classmate on the definition of a key term in Lei’s first draft of his research paper. This discussion furthered Lei’s thought on an important issue for his research on regulation of the digital music market by non-economic powers. In discussing their disheartening experiences with blogging, one “painful” experience was that their blog posts were not frequently responded to by their peers. Kang says, “ ” (E12) [“It is boring when the blog is left there and read only by me or the teacher, receiving no comments from others.”] (E12). It is interesting that receiving instructor feedback was not considered as exciting as the feedback from peers. Writing for an audience, excluding the instructor who seldom responds, turns blogging into, in Kang’s words, a “ ” [“very painful”] one-way communication. One reason behind a lack of regular peer feedback, the interview data suggests, is that the asynchronous nature of blog-mediated communication does not invite active interaction. As Ruo points out, “ ”(E13) [“(I) might read a comment written a week ago and I don’t know when she (the blogger who left the comment) will be on the blog again.”] Beyond the technological constraints, the informants also questioned the feasibility and necessity of providing frequent blog-based peer feedback. Sen points out that the huge amount of blog posts generated through regular blogging makes reading and responding a real challenge for both instructor and students:

(E13) In fact, it is time consuming for the instructor to read all the blog posts one by one. The students cannot and do not have so much time to browse blog posts by so many people. Honestly, it’s quite difficult. But it’s important to oneself. Because you know that [the posts are] possible to be read by others. You’ve got to write well. Then [you can] save it for reflections and recollections in the future. The stuff is all very precious. (E13) Sen further questions the necessity of providing frequent feedback on blogs. He notes that the students already have sufficient time for face-to-face interactions through presentations and discussions in class. Hence for Sen, the value of blogging lies more in reflecting upon “ ”[“self”] than in interacting with “others”, although the existence of the potential audience can help monitor the writing process.

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Fig. 7.

The other frustrating blogging experiences, as the interview data suggests, are associated with technical issues. The students started with MSN Spaces, their favorite blog hosting service, which provides flexible design templates which can be easily personalized. Ruo says, (F15) You won’t feel comfortable with other blogs after using MSN. I’m most comfortable with MSN [Spaces]. You just want to do [something there] and to manage it. (F15) The move from MSN Spaces to Boyake [“ ”], the PKU blog hosting service, reduced the students’ joy about personalizing their blogs. Despite its easy access7 , Kang notes that, compared with MSN Spaces, “ ”[“Boyake is so out”] (F15). Specifically, Lei notes that unlike MSN Spaces, Boyake [“ ”] does not allow him to personalize the interface of his blog. He says, 7

Many students need to go through the trouble of finding a proxy server to access their blogs at MSN Spaces so as to avoid the Internet fee that the university charges for accessing web sites outside China.

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(F15) The blog post at Boyake reads very uncomfortably because the column is too narrow. For MSN, you can format [the interface of your blog post] yourself, such as broadening the title and etc. It seems that Boyake does not support this. (F15) Besides, like any technology, the instability of Boyake [“ ”] is frustrating for writing.8 Lei says that he once lost a long entry at Boyake [“ ”] in the process of posting, and he adds that “ ”[“Tired of rewriting, (I) posted a short blog post instead.”] (F16) 5. Discussion The focus group findings suggest three major implications of integrating blogging into Doing English Digital: First, the blogging activities for Doing English Digital seem to have engaged the learners in an active construction of self-identities using both verbal and visual resources. The focus group findings suggest that blogging has raised the learner’s awareness of their self-identity, encouraged their use of verbal and visual resources in representing themselves, and enhanced their responsibility in writing. Having grown up in a rapidly changing China in the 1990’s, this generation of Chinese youth, often labeled the “Me Generation” (Elegant, July 26, 2007), has enjoyed greater social freedom and economic prosperity than their parents. They tend to place more importance on individual identity and attach more value to self expression. Blogging for Doing English Digital allows the students to develop their new identities, not only as EFL learners frequently considered as “one homogeneous group” (Hirvela & Belcher, 2001, p.103), but also as responsible young researchers with individual styles. Also, as they actively use a variety of semiotic resources to find their voice and construct their new identities, they can potentially contribute to the expansion of dominant academic genres that rely heavily on the use of linguistic resources for idea expression. Second, blogging for Doing English Digital helps to provide the social and affective support that students need in the process of completing their digital research project. The focus group findings show that most learners were more motivated to write with blogs than with traditional word-processing software; the flexibility in personalizing an individual project space motivated the students to write, and the possibility of sharing each others’ work in a blog community enhanced their performance motivation. Students in traditional writing environments often write for an inauthentic audience, such as instructors. Blogging students are more motivated to write in their own spaces with the anticipation of being read and responded to by an authentic audience: their classmates and anyone who visits their blogs. Third, blogging for Doing English Digital encourages the use of metacognition strategies such as planning, selfmonitoring, and reflections, leading to a deepened understanding of the conceptual and procedural knowledge essential to the development of digital literacy skills. The focus group findings suggest that blogging for Doing English Digital supports the learners in individualizing their own process of research writing, enabling the learners to use selfmonitoring strategies such as making multiple revisions. Contrary to Chan and Ridgway (2006), blogging seems to promote these learners to generate deep reflections upon the research writing process, the evaluation criteria, and the research topic. The opposite findings on the effects of blogging on reflection between the two studies are not surprising. In Chan and Ridgway (2006), learners were required to reflect upon the content of weekly lectures offered by the instructor, while in this study, the learners use blogs to document and reflect on the research process of their self-selected research topics. This study’s findings suggest that learners are more likely to generate deeper reflections through blogging when the design of the blogging activities centers on learner knowledge and interests. The meta-cognitive potentials of blogging are valuable for the development of EFL literacy skills in general. Research on second-language (L2) writing suggests that L2 writers tend to plan less and reflect less upon written texts than writers in their native language (Hyland, 2002; Silva, 1993). Specifically, although empirical research on the writing strategies of EFL learners in China is scant (Wen & Wang, 2004), the existing research suggests that Asian learners exhibit fewer of the strategies expected of “good” language learners than did L2 learners in other regions (Lee 8

When I was revising this manuscript in the October of 2008, neither the student blogs nor the instructor blog created on Boyake for the course in the year of 2006 were accessible.

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& Oxford, 2008; O’Malley et al., 1985; Politzer & McGroarty, 1985). Moreover, direct instruction of metacognition strategies are often considered ineffective (Garner, 1987), hence the metacognitive value of blogging might support the use of an embedded approach for fostering higher order thinking skills in the EFL context. Despite these positive implications, the study’s findings also suggest that contrary to findings in the United States, blogging in Doing English Digital does not seem to be conducive to knowledge co-construction. The focus group findings indicate that a lack of peer feedback is one of the most frustrating experiences in blogging. This finding is contrary to the findings of the studies on blogging in the L1 context but consistent with the findings in Wu (2006) and Chan and Ridgway (2006). In accounting for their findings, Wu (2006) and Chan and Ridgway (2006) have ascribed a lack of peer interaction to cultural factors: Chinese students are not accustomed to expressing their opinions in public spaces, and in the Chinese educational culture where teachers are often regarded as the source of knowledge, students do not consider peer interactions to be a valuable part of learning. However, this study’s findings suggest that beyond cultural factors, a lack of active knowledge co-construction might be closely related to the limited interactivity of the blog technology as well as the design of blogging activities. Originally developed for documenting personal notes, links, and commentary, the blog, by its very nature, is an authoring tool that supports asynchronous communication centered on the author’s posts (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright, 2004; Nardi, Schiano, & Gumbrecht, 2004). The delay in responding to a post or comment, be it a matter of hours or days, disintegrates the sense of “co-presence” between blogger and reader, which may discourage intensive conversations and knowledge co-construction. When this study was conducted in 2006, SMS notification, a widget that alerts bloggers to the arrival of new comments, was not incorporated into blogs. Thus, it was even more difficult to sustain a conversation. Besides, the design of the blogging activities for Doing English Digital may also limit active peer interaction since the students are only encouraged, not required, to provide feedback to each other’s posts on a regular basis. To maximize the value of the interactive features of blogs in knowledge co-construction, instructors cannot expect the students to interact with each other automatically but need to design meaningful activities, such as providing feedback within small groups or use the class blog for the discussion of specific topics, that encourage collaborative learning. A related finding is the fact that only the students taking the course have joined in the blog community for Doing English Digital, which contrasts with the popular belief that blogging enables the learners to connect to “a valuable public” and can thus extend the traditional community of learning (see Farmer, 2006; Lowe &Williams, 2004). The course’s self-oriented documentation and reflections upon research projects in diverse disciplines are unlikely to attract sustained attention from a general audience in the blogosphere. Campbell (2004) has suggested extension of this community by using blog hosting services with built-in social networking features. Still, to extend the blog community beyond the class, instructors need to encourage students to actively connect to “a valuable public” and to explore various methods of social networking online and offline. The other constraint of integrating blogging into Doing English Digital, as reflected in the focus group findings, is the difficulties of finding the “right” blog hosting service that is user-friendly, stable, and free. A small number of tech-savvy instructors have set up their blogs on their own computers using software such as WordPress available at . For instructors who do not have the skills or access to these resources, one possibility is to follow the latest development of social software technologies and experiment with different free tools. For example, the recent launch of Google Sites at combines the features of blogs and Wikis and may serve as a more flexible way of managing personal learning spaces (for example, see my Updated course site for Doing English Digital at )9 . 6. Conclusion Findings from this exploratory study suggest that integrating blogging into project-based EFL digital literacy pedagogy has the potential to engage learners in active identity construction using verbal and visual resources and to provide the social, affective, and metacognitive support essential to the development of digital literacy skills. Despite these potential strengths, findings from this study also indicate that the value of blogging seems to lie more in self-reflection than in active peer interaction and collaborative knowledge construction. 9

However, access to Google sites has been blocked in China since 2009.

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To maximize the value of blogging, EFL instructors need to integrate blogs with other social networking technologies and design meaningful activities that would not only encourage peer interaction, but also support the development of social networking skills. Such skills are highly valued in the Web 2.0 era and are essential for extending knowledge co-construction beyond the class-based community. My hope is that as EFL learners actively reflect and interact with members of diverse learning communities, they will be able to transform themselves from anonymous EFL learners to active knowledge creators, thus making their own unique contributions to an ever-expanding Read/Write Web. Acknowledgements This study is part of the project entitled “Web-based Project Assessment Model for the College English Curriculum” [04CYY012] granted by the Chinese National Foundation of Philosophy and Social Sciences. Portions of this paper were presented at The 3rd PacCALL Annual Conference, November 16-19, 2006, at Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. I am grateful to Cheris Kramarae, Clifford Hill, as well as the anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions; to Zhang Qi for facilitating the focus group interview; and to all the students participating in the study. Zhang Wei is an associate professor of English at Peking University, China. Her research interests include digital literacy, ICT and gender, assessment, and professional development. Her recent publications include Feminist invitational collaboration in a digital age: Looking over disciplinary and national borders, Women and Language 31, (2) (co-author with Cheris Kramarae), and Integrating EFL Standards into Chinese Classroom Settings (co-author with Tim Murphey et. al.), a four-volume professional development series published by McGraw-Hill and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

Appendix A. Focus Group Interview Questions

A.1. English Translations of Focus Group Questions 1. 2. 3. 4.

Did you have personal blogs before taking the course? What are the major uses of your personal blogs? How did you feel when setting up your blogs for this course? As you look back at the process of completing your research projects, what do you think about using blogs for academic English writing? 5. What are your pleasant and discouraging experiences with blogging? 6. What kind of role do blogs play in the whole process of research writing? 7. If you had other options, what kind of technology would you choose to facilitate the completion of such a research project? References Anderson, Terry. (2005). Distance learning – Social software’s killer app? Retrieved from http://www.unisa.edu.au/odlaaconference/ PPDF2 s/13%20odlaa%20-%20Anderson.pdf. Barret, Helen. E-Portfolios for Learning [blog]. Retrieved from http://electronicportfolios.org/blog. Benson, Philip. (2001). Teaching and researching autonomy in language learning. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Bernstein, Mark. (2004). Do weblogs improve writing? Retrieved from http://markbernstein.org/Jan0401/DoWeblogsImproveWriting.html Bloch, Joel. (2007). Abdullah’s Blogging: A Generation 1.5 student enters the Blogosphere. Language Learning & Technology, 11 (2), 128-141. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol11num2/bloch/default.html.

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